The question that has sparked an animated discussion across Pakistan is whether Pashtun nationalism can bring an end to the Pakistani state carved out of British India as the home for Muslims. This follows the military establishment, the real power centre of the country considering   Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan as their victory especially as a means to suppress the ever-growing Pashtun nationalism.

Previously, during the brief Taliban rule over Afghanistan in the late 1990s, the Pakistani military thought that the Taliban would not only recognize the Durand Line that divides the two countries, but would also curb the undercurrents of Pashtun nationalism in the northwest frontier, thus providing an outlet for Pakistani Islamists. However, things turned out quite the opposite; the Taliban refused to recognize the Durand Line and encouraged Pashtun nationalism.  Taliban is Pashtun dominated group now as it was two decades ago. So much so, it is naïve of Pakistani military and civilian establishments to think that aid and support   will lure the Taliban to accept the legitimacy of Durand Line and suppress its own Pashtun people from voicing their dissent.

Previously, post-Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the subsequent petro-dollar ‘jihad’, a condition of unending regional militancy, drained local economic resources, thereby the only means of income left for the large number of orphans and widows from the conflict were through border crossings. While those manning these crossings earned hugely by patronising the local informal economy, the labourers only got their daily wages.

During this period, local tribes continued to flourish on account of the social relations of production since administration in Afghanistan and Pakistan was not directly controlling the cross-border ties of production and mobility. Therefore, shops on one side of the border attracted buyers from the other; schools on Pakistan’s side enrolled students from Afghanistan, and farmers tilled land on both sides of the border.

However, since the last decade Pakistan witnessed the impact of growing Pashtun nationalism with frequent attacks by members of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Pakistani Taliban) and   Islamabad got obsessed with militarizing the local space. Starting in 2017, the fencing of the 2,600km-long Pak-Afghan border damaged beyond repair the interests of over eight million tribal Pakhtuns from Bajaur district in ex-FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Area now part of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province) to the Chaman crossing in Balochistan. The fencing was officiated in the name of national security to secure Pakistan from the TTP and its supporting agencies across the border. However, TTP attacks continued even in the absence of these agencies but the fencing has deprived thousands of local workers from earning their means of sustenance.

At Torkham border crossing, local miseries are in plenty. When the border is closed, shops are without business. When open, the place is flooded with hundreds of desperate people including seriously sick patients. Helpless women with incomplete documents wait for days with either the sick or crying infants to cross the border. A journalist recorded an incident where an elderly man had slept on a concrete pavement for six days to see his daughter, who was married across the border but he left without seeing his daughter due to incomplete travel documents and insufficient money.

Further, even children wait at the border for a chance to ‘smuggle’ edibles to the other side. They have mastered the art of hiding in between the wheels of large moving trailers, to go undetected and some would be lucky to earn $6 per day to feed their families, if they survived.

Of the economic discrimination, a journalist noted that the   local labour had been turned to   crime (smuggling) and the exchange value of local miseries never depreciates. Quoting a cab driver, he records, “Touts take Rs50,000 to smuggle a person across the border.”  Truckloads of spoiled fruits due to waiting at the border tell of huge wastage of resources and loss of potential revenue. The state spends millions of taxpayers’ money on pleading the case of the Afghan Taliban, but the queue of loaded vehicles parked on both sides of the divide tell a different story.

When the Torkham corridor is closed for business, local workers either sit idle waiting for it to open or organise protests. Further, while covering workers’ protest at Torkham, the journalist (cited above) noted an armed official telling a local labourer, “Don’t defame Pakistan.” A conflict zone is never ordained by fate; but the state demonises the Pakhtuns and projects the situation as one that demands military action. He writes, “Such border crossings have become an iconic spectacle to observe the state’s virtual war on the local people.”

Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor at the City University of New York, once said: “It is the peculiar fate of oppressed people everywhere that when they are killed, they are killed twice: first by bullet or bomb, and next by the language used to describe their deaths.”

The tribal Pakhtuns live this peculiar fate. They are being killed by bullets, sliced apart by fencing, and silenced by the state machinery. Living in this state of apartheid, they are left with few options; to quit or become war fodder in the state’s foreign policy designs and the least of which is to rise up to initiate a civil war.

Islamabad is repeating its previous mistake. It is treating the Pashtuns and other tribal communities similar the treatment meted out to the Bengali community of the erstwhile East Pakistan, after independence, that ultimately led to the creation of Bangladesh.

Pakistan has been cashing in on a narrative that India wants a complete end to the Pakistani state by fostering Pashtun nationalism. In making this claim, Pakistan usually refers to India’s involvement in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. The loss of around one-third of Pakistani territory also struck at the root of its raison d’etre as a state in which Islam was supposed to supersede all ethnic and linguistic differences.

However, it is a universally known fact that when there is a conflict between ethnicity and religion, ethnic identity takes precedence. This has been the truth for several civil wars across centuries in various parts of the world and so is also true for Bengali community of the erstwhile East Pakistan. Although they were a Muslim majority community but due to their Bengali ethnic origin, they were treated as second class citizens and to voice against this discrimination, they initiated a rebellion. To curb the Bengali rebellion, Pakistani administration resorted to bloody massacre killing thousands of Bengalis. If such is the policy of the state, then secession from it is only a natural result.

In the case of Pashtuns, they are the same people who live on the either side of the Durand Line and it is only natural for them to be united to their people and land on either side. The feeling of ethnic belonging among the Pashtun community on either side of the Durand line is very strong combined with systemic discrimination and violence meted out to them by the Pakistani state, such that any initial spark towards a civil war that might result in subsuming Durand Line and unification of Pakistan’s provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan with Afghanistan, will be from within the Pashtun people themselves without requirement of any external provocation.

Hence, a basic analysis of conflict on the Durand line theatre suggests there is neither any role nor necessity for India’s intervention as the Pakistani propaganda suggests. A civil war for Pashtun unity is a definite future. (POREG)